The present invention relates to prepared materials for an article for smoking which is hand rolled by the smoker and includes a sleeve section rolled into a tube-shaped sleeve and a filler made of tobacco.
Smoking articles with tube-shaped sleeves are generally known as cigars, cigarillos and cigarettes. Cigars consist of a tobacco filler, a surrounding wrapper holding the tobacco together and an exterior cover or wrapper; one differentiates between hand rolled and machined-manufacture types. The first are produced in special factories in which the rolling by hand requires years of practice and great dexterity. The filler always consists of selected whole, half or quartered tobacco leaves (so called "long filler"). With the manufacture of cigars by machine a chopped or short length tobacco ("short filler") is used as the filler. Likewise, the machine manufactured short filler products are cigarillos and short cigars which are produced continuously as strands or individually and are cut to length. Finally cigarettes consist of fine tobacco cuttings in a tube-shaped paper sleeve.
Apart from machine manufactured cigarettes, cigarette tobaccos and cigarette papers in packages have for a long time been available for the smoker to roll his own cigarettes by hand and in some cases with the aid of simple assisting devices. By this means the smoker rolls a portion of the cigarette tobacco in a rectangular cigarette paper and then glues the paper along its lengthwise edge. For such products a long-standing and important question is whether the self-rolled cigarettes provide the individual with smoking pleasure comparable to the ready-made cigarettes in packages and also do they offer considerable price value?
Cigarette smoking is naturally differentiated from cigar or pipe smoking in that it is not concerned with pure tobacco consumption: the cigarette paper impairs at least the tobacco aroma and can, additionally, have other influences to which the smoker himself as well as passive smokers take exception.
On account of this, there is an effort, at least for the smoker who rolls his own cigarettes, to replace the cigarette paper with a tobacco product. Such attempts however have shown that it is not fruitful to manually make a stable cigarette-like product out of cigarette tobacco (fine cuttings) for the filler and a sleeve section out of tobacco substantially in the shape of cigarette paper. In particular, in order to be able to roll a tobacco leaf it must have a specific moisture content, and when in this condition, it reacts entirely differently than a leaf of paper. The later allows itself to be readily rolled by hand in a "dry" condition and lends the necessary stability to the product.
It is accordingly an object of the present invention to make possible the rolling of a cigarette-like product by the smoker in the customary manner, which product, however, does not require a paper sleeve but instead consists entirely of tobacco.